English Global food systems are failing people and coupled with COVID-19 pandemic, the UN Food Systems Summit has a lot to address; 265 million people are threatened by famine, up 50% on last year; 700 million suffer from chronic hunger; and 2 billion more from malnutrition.
La Via Campesina co-signed a letter together with 173 organisations from 83 different countries to the UN Secretary General raising concerns of corporate involvement in the UN Food Systems Summit due to take place this year. The letter, penned in March 2020, raised concerns about the appointment of the special envoy for the UN Food Summit – Dr Agnes Kalibata – who is also President to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) as well as the many corporate bodies given space at the table.
“Given the history of AGRA, the appointment of its President to lead, prepare, and design the Summit, will result in another forum that advances the interests of agribusiness at the expense of farmers and our planet. Founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, AGRA’s efforts have centered on capturing and diverting public resources to benefit large corporate interests. Their finance-intensive and high input agricultural model is not sustainable beyond constant subsidy, which is drawn from increasingly scarce public resources. Since 2006, AGRA has worked to open up Africa — seen as an untapped market for corporate monopolies controlling commercial seeds, genetically modified crops, fossil fuel-heavy synthetic fertilizers and polluting pesticides.”
AGRA’s private sector funders also include Nestle and Bayer Monsanto and receives money from the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office i.e. UK aid. Their aim is to shift from subsistence to business. There is concern that corporate interest is diverting attention from real solutions; agroecology is not offered as a solution to global food systems and as a solution to tackle world hunger.
Recognise crop diversity
There seems to be little concerted effort from AGRA to support a diversity of crops or to bolster the huge variety of traditional African vegetables that have been naturalised in their environment, offering nutritional and natural diversity, rather choosing to focus on a select few cash crops. The Action Tracks outlined by the UNFSS include a shift to sustainable consumption patterns, to ensure access to safe and nutritious food for all and to build resilience to vulnerabilities, shocks and stress, action points that could well be delivered by agro-ecological farming and the production of a wide variety of crops. Biodiversity and diversity of crops serves resilience.
Landlessness not on the agenda
The Asian Peasant Coalition has raised the issue of landlessness, and land grabbing. Despite the FSS Action Point 4 of ‘advancing equitable livelihoods’, trends like the concentration of land, particularly into the hands of big agribusiness firms and their networks, are not highlighted in discussions. They expressed concern that the FSS “will only end up in legitimising and further advancing tighter imperialist control over food and agriculture.”
And now?
La Via Campesina, US Food Sovereignty Alliance, Civil Society and Indigenous Peoples’ Mechanism have now announced that they will no longer engage in, endorse or support the UN Food Systems Summit. They raise serious concerns regarding the UNFSS legitimacy, corporate influence, lack of focus on human rights, opportunity for small scale producers to engage with processes and the democratic nature of the process and its establishment.
Outline of some of the key points raised:
- Excessive emphasis put on technological solutions that are introduced as a universal solution to food systems problems.
- The Food System Summit’s process is directed vertically by a non-institutional body, with a private secretariat and out of any control of the member countries.
- The initiator and main partner of the summit is the World Economic Forum (WEF), which brings together the richest and most powerful corporations in the world. These corporations are largely responsible for the degradation of the environmental state of the world, the rise in inequality and food insecurity.
- The UNFSS has not been validated by the UN General Assembly.
- Civil society organisations and in particular organisations of food producers (peasants, fisherfolk, indigenous peoples, rural women, pastoralists, agricultural workers, etc.) have been sidelined throughout the process leading to the “summit”
- The lack of democratic inclusion of food producers’ organisations (and particularly small-scale food producers) within the bodies created to manage the process
Read the ECVC full letter here, fully explaining their position.
